Toward Truly Personal Chatbots: On the Development of Custom Conversational Assistants

Chatbots, i.e., conversational software agents able to interact with users via instant messaging channels like Messenger, WhatsApp or SMS, have the power to substantively simplify human-computer interaction thanks to their natural language paradigm. While this certainly helps to lower barriers, state-of-the-art chatbots prevalently provide access to generic, non-personalized features with relatively little usefulness. This may hinder adoption. To provide users with real value, we envision a kind of chatbot that is personal and helpful by providing services that are chosen and configured by the users themselves, for themselves. As the development of a one-size-fits-all, yet flexible and customizable bot is hard, if not impossible, we discuss requirements and design options that directly put the user into control of their own personal bot.